Events have once again brought Northern Ireland to the fore, in which we can see just how fragile things are. We’re getting to a point where it wouldn’t take very much to reignite tensions. The peace process was never properly resolved. At most, it is a frozen conflict and the sand timer was set. The real test of the GFA is how well it withstands these times of uncertainty and economic peril. Community relations always fray when the going gets tough.

This is where I think ECHR withdrawal will cause rather a lot of bother. Initially, I took the view that the wording of the GFA meant that Britain had to remain a member, but came around to the view that an alternate NI specific mechanism could be negotiated, so long as it were administered by agreement with a neutral panel of judges able to avail themselves of ECHR jurisprudence. What that looks like is anybody’s guess.

But then as Dominic Grieve states in a recent report…

Convention rights are enshrined as governing the actions of the devolved administrations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and legislation to alter their competence would engage the Sewel Convention, with significant political consequences for the stability of the Union. Most importantly, the ECHR forms a central part of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, which expressly commits the UK Government to the incorporation of Convention rights into Northern Ireland law. The suggestion advanced by the Wolfson Review and Policy Exchange that this commitment can be discharged by a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights detached from the Convention and therefore the right of appeal to the Strasbourg Court is a casuistical distortion of the plain words of the Agreement. Withdrawal would open the prospect of a new era of political discord quite apart from the impracticality of our courts having to operate different rights systems in one country. Furthermore, it does not address the fact that actions by the UK Government can also have an impact on Northern Ireland.

While I am very far from a fan of arch-Europhile Dominic Grieve, he does have something of a point. Potential snag points in negotiations would centre on trust, sovereignty, equivalence of protections, institutional design, and political buy-in from Northern Irish parties. Good luck with that.

We should note that one of the reasons mooted for leaving the ECHR is to cut off the means by which British soldiers can be prosecuted but it is likely that certain parties would not agree to any replacement mechanism unless that path to “justice” were available (thereby defeating the point of withdrawal).

While Suella Braverman, in her report on the subject, believes this negotiation process could be wrapped up in six months, she is away with the fairies. Ultimately, this thing would have to be ratified and that will not go smoothly. While no single group has an absolute veto, the interlocking consent mechanisms, power-sharing rules, and treaty nature gives multiple actors tools to delay, dilute, or derail - and they will… because they can - and to see what else they can leverage out of the deal.

The GFA is not easily amended. It requires negotiation, cross-community buy-in, and intergovernmental agreement. A new adjudication system would likely need amendments to the Northern Ireland Act 1998, supplementary agreements, or a review process, making sabotage feasible through refusal to consent, collapse of institutions, or international pressure.

If ECHR withdrawal is instigated by a Reform/Tory coalition with a limited majority, any such amendment could end up on the rocks. While this is unlike Brexit, with a sudden death threat of terminating formal trade agreements, it risks the disintegration of the GFA. To me, that seems highly probable. It will be sabotaged, and it’s impossible to say who will sabotage it. It could come from any side for virtually any reason.

If you put this to anyone on the British right, their response tends to be “Nah, it’ll be fine” but there is no grounds for such optimism in relation to the politics of Northern Ireland. It will not be smooth sailing. No thought has been given to what happens if the GFA collapses.

Ironically, I’d be far more reassured if the actual plan was to collapse it, along with a firm decision either way on the future of the Windsor Framework. As the Joker says in the Dark Knight… Nobody panics when things go according to plan - even if the plan is horrifying. But there is no firm policy on this from anyone on the right.

While much of this has been hypothetical wargaming over the last few months, on this blog and elsewhere, events over the weekend remind us that the situation is more fragile than it’s been for a very long time, and the are community level fractures and shifting tectonics which are impossible to predict. We can assume, the Irish state will take a hostile posture towards Britain, probably stoking up sectarian sentiment, at which point there could be a democrat in the White House (yes, MAGA could blow it), and the EU would certainly stick its oar in.

This is the sort of wargaming that Reform ought to be thinking about, but for all of the British right, leaving the ECHR is now an article of faith, and all of the parties are too invested to u-turn. If there is a right wing government in 2029, ECHR withdrawal will happen, and Northern Ireland will again dominate the process as it did with Brexit. This is not an ambush we should walk into but we almost certainly will. It is going to be a royal mess - and the scenes we’ve seen over the weekend could end up becoming a weekly occurrence.

The dumb part about this is that the riots this weekend almost certainly tip the balance in terms of ECHR margin of appreciation and the public interest test, where even the dumbest of judges can see that overly generous asylum decisions have inflammatory and dangerous consequences. We might very will be upsetting the applecart for no good reason.

The thing about being a blogger, particularly one who inhabits X, is that you eventually reach a point where you’ve seen every possible permutation of every mainstream opinion, and most of the fringe ones too. You can tell just by some of the vocabulary what you’re in for without going any deeper. It’s why I sound so jaded these days. I’m craving for somebody to tell me something I don’t already know. I get seriously bored of watching the same old people recycling the same old talking points and tedious rhetoric. It is something of a delight, then, to read this latest piece on the disturbances in Belfast by . You should read every word of it.

The piece puts me in a difficult spot as far as blogging goes in that it cannot be filleted or harvested for quotes. It’s the full picture that matters here. While it’s a tale of deindustrialisation and working class displacement, similar to many places in the North of England, it runs concurrently with legacy traumas from the Troubles, exacerbated by mass immigration, giving rise to a more acute identity crisis.

Here, if you’ll allow me a short digression, I’d suggest Northern Ireland isn’t exactly unique in terms of a disintegrating social fabric. Thanks to recent years of mass immigration, where there is nothing discernibly British for new arrivals to integrate into, coupled with increasing levels of white flight, we are seeing the integration process go into reverse, with third and fourth generation migrants looking to their own ethnic heritage for a sense of identity and belonging. We’re human. Reversion to tribe is instinctive in these times of insecurity and instability.

Of particular significance in Sara Morrison’s blog, though, is this…

"And Brexit is a live constitutional wound, not ancient history. The protocol, the Windsor Framework, the endless negotiation over what Northern Ireland actually is, all of it landed hardest on unionist working-class communities who voted to leave and found themselves in a different constitutional arrangement to the rest of the UK almost overnight. The sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away, and nobody in power has offered them an honest answer about where they stand.

Here is what almost nobody with a platform in this place is willing to say. A certain kind of liberal political culture in Northern Ireland has spent thirty years treating unionist working-class communities as either a punchline or a problem to be managed. The fuck-the-DUP aesthetic was fashionable for a long time. Mocking unionism, treating loyalist culture as inherently ridiculous, performing exasperation at people who voted the wrong way, all of it was socially acceptable in the circles that produce our commentariat and our political class, and the people on the receiving end noticed, the way people always notice when they are being condescended to.

Leave voters will be all too familiar with that elite condescension but it goes double for Unionists who were deceived and misled throughout Brexit by the Tories then shoved aside when they were no longer useful.

This is important because the Protocol was always a technocratic fudge to shelve the issue, and we've left it to rot ever since - because nobody wants to spend the political capital on a definitive solution - and nobody wants the headaches that go with revisiting it. Northern Ireland was not supposed to be a feature of Brexit negotiations. Prior to triggering Article 50, it was only ever seen by Brexiteers as a fly in the ointment, rather than a constitutional dilemma that could derail the entire enterprise.

The problem is that this stasis born of political indifference cannot stand, especially when so many other factors are exacerbating the underlying tensions (not least mass immigration). It is only a matter of time before the existing settlement runs out of road. Constitutionally, NI is neither fish nor fowl, left to rot, and now suffers the indignity of having the third world dumped on their doorstep while having no say in it. A collapse of the existing settlement is a rapidly approaching inevitability.

In particular, the British right is resolved to leave the ECHR, without clarifying the status of the GFA, and whether once again Northern Ireland will be asked to swallow yet another legal bodge that further separates it from the UK. We're just pretending that problem doesn't exist. There are legal, technical and moral questions pertaining to NI that go with leaving the ECHR, which the the British right glosses over because the search for definitive answers would be too much like thinking.

The people on the ground know too well that all the issues (which were never properly resolved in 1997 and 2019) will once again come to the fore, and Unionists know that they will again be last in the pecking order. Nobody on the right has the decency to give them a straight answer about their constitutional future, while the left wing parties offer nothing but more of the same decay and neglect. NI will soon become a nexus point where the every political actor on all sides will have a go at stirring the pot, and the results will be explosive.

At this point, I am far out of my depth as a commentator in that I lack the intimate understanding of Irish political tectonic plates, but I know enough to know that all is not well south of the border either. Ireland’s liberal establishment is a light years out of step with the public, while the republic has its own nascent nativist movement in common with most European nations.

In the event that Britain pulls the trigger on ECHR withdrawal, it is likely that the Irish government will seek to frustrate the proceedings for its own cynical purposes, possibly even attempting to stoke traditional divisions - right about the time when Ireland’s underclass on either side of the border has more in common in terms of their opposition to mass migration. Meanwhile, Ireland’s liberal immigration policy sees many north of the border calling for a hard border.

I can’t even begin to predict how all that unfolds politically, and wouldn’t be arrogant enough to try and make sense of it, but we can say that’s it’s going to be a royal mess, and this time around, it is unlikely that Unionists will meekly consent to yet another technical fudge that leaves them in a constitutional state of limbo. If, then, that calls for a wider unravelling of the Brexit settlement and the GFA, then there’s the intractable and dangerous question of what replaces it, and where the EU stands in all of this.

My own reading of the ECHR situation is that we should leave it well alone in that it simply isn’t necessary to quit it just to get a grip on our asylum problems - but that also ducks the issue of a failing settlement in Northern Ireland. Unlike the early 2000s, this is not something that can be glossed over with regeneration and political bungs. We’re looking at a more permanent state of disorder that will only intensify if immigration is not brought under control.

The concern here is that this is a little understood problem, for which there are no obvious solutions, which the intellectual pygmies of Reform haven’t even begun to grapple with, whose understanding of the Brexit settlement was never all that great to begin with. If the Farage clan (under guidance from Braverman) approaches ECHR withdrawal with the same witlessness and arrogance as they approached Brexit, then this could easily blow up in their faces - regardless of whether the immigration problem abates.

On a few occasions, now, I’ve attempted to start a debate on how all this plays out politically, but there’s been no takers. Much of it is unknown and unknowable, but the frightening part is the lack of interest in finding out.

When I saw the footage of a Sudanese man apparently trying to behead an individual on the streets of Belfast, I can’t say I was shocked. After all, this is no longer out of the ordinary, and I’ve seen worse. I’m used to it now, so I don’t have the same visceral anger I once had. In a sense, Sadiq Khan is right when he says atrocities are all just part and parcel of living in a big city. They certainly are when those in power have resolved to do absolutely nothing about it.

As such, it’s a good thing that there are still people around who do get angry. Too many comparable incidents have occurred without a public response, and that patience has not been rewarded.

That is not to say I condone any of what I've seen in Belfast. I mean, I'd go to prison if I did, but all the same, it's not my preferred way of doing things. But then my preferred way of doing things (voting and public debate) hasn't made the slightest impact on the decision-making of the state. As such, there was a certain inevitability about this.

Moreover, it's not really my place to judge. I am an extremely fortunate individual who happens to live in a 99% white rural area, miles from any "diversity" and thanks to my self-employed status, I don't have to self-censor or live a double life at work. I don't have to bottle up my opinions. I actually make a modest income by expressing them.

Most low income working class people, meanwhile, have to live in close proximity to diversity and the squalor that goes with it. Their votes are even more worthless as mine (in that their votes are nullified by a leftist student population), and they can't speak their minds freely because there'll be some HR ghoul in the mix who will fire them. Ordinary people bear the burden of potentially losing everything for having the wrong opinions.

Meanwhile, they can work hard to carve out a little corner of peace for themselves, just for the local authority to turn next door into a migrant HMO with illegal Deliveroo drivers coming and going at all hours. It's their communities being turned into alien, hostile and violent slums. To then say there is “no justification” for riots is to tell them they simply have to suck it up - even when they run the risk of an African savage beheading them. What are they supposed to do? Write to their MP? Everyone has a breaking point.

While politicians call for calm, they can only expect to be heeded if they actually do something, but remaining calm when the politicians continue to sit on their hands as people are butchered in the street is absolutely bovine. Ultimately these riots are a consequence of the wilful deafness of politicians, and the blame for what we've seen tonight lies squarely in their shop.

As it happens, the disturbances were not confined to Belfast. I’ve seen footage of protests in Liverpool and Glasgow, and others were slated to happen elsewhere. It is likely we will see more of the same before Summer is out because these things keep happening. We’ve seen HMOs attacked, Deliveroo drivers harassed and told to “get back on your dinghy” and vandalism directed at Turkish barbers.

One might observe that Turkish barbers wouldn't have been attacked had they been closed down for being the money laundering operations they are. In fact, most of this could have been avoided by the state performing its most basic obligations.

As ever though, the reaction from the left has been about what you’d expect. Open borders zealot Zoe Gardner remarks “This is what these thugs do when their “concerns” are legitimised & parroted all over the top of politics & throughout the media”. The usual suspects will seek to blame Farage, Elon Musk, and spooky social media algorithms. It doesn’t occur to them that people might actually have a problem with Sundanese immigration cheats butchering people in the street.

Interestingly, independent Moslem MP, Adnan Hussein, rebukes her in saying “No, this is decades upon decades of suppression, decades of the country's leadership refusing to deal with this pent-up anger and frustration in a manner that would avoid the scenes we're witnessing today. Minority communities will now pay the price for these failures”. He earlier remarked “When a person recently granted leave to remain attempts to behead someone in the street, public concern is entirely legitimate. Silencing that concern doesn't make it disappear. It simply stores up anger that will ultimately be directed at innocent refugees/minority communities”.

While he is correct, he’s ignoring the obvious that these "innocent refugees/minority communities" (who will pay the price) are here without our consent. They were never wanted, they were imposed upon us, and they are definitely not welcome here. That’s another part of the problem. There is now a very real sense that Britons have been subordinated in their own homeland and forced to live among alien cultures without ever having had a say in it. Whoever thought that was a good idea?

This instance, mind you, makes for some complex politics later down the line. As I understand it, the Sudanese migrant in Belfast travelled from Sudan to Paris, to Dublin, Dublin to Belfast and then claimed asylum. He was granted leave to remain in 2023 by none other than Robert Jenrick. Nobody in Reform, the Tory Party or Restore has a convincing answer as to how to prevent Northern Ireland being used as a back door in the vent of our departure from the ECHR. Asylum rights, as I understand it, are grandfathered under the Windsor Framework and GFA.

Over on X, Peter Sarris remarks “If we are ever to get control of immigration in the UK we will also have to have a radical revision of our relations with the Irish Republic. Given the readiness of the latter to give away Irish residency/citizenship like confetti, we can’t just continue to allow free entry to UK”.

In the meantime, we can reasonably assume that authorities will become ever more clandestine in moving migrants around the country, probably giving Northern Ireland a wide berth. One wonders what will happen when the rest of the UK works out what it takes to stop the government seeding violent savages in their communities.

What we can say with absolute certainty is that last night is not the end of it, and this issue will continue to fester. Stopping the boats might temporarily take some of the heat out of the situation, but that still leaves Britain having to manage the economic and social consequences of unprecedented unwanted mass migration, and an influx of incompatible and alien cultures. “Community cohesion” is not going to heal, and this latest outrage is far form the last one.

The marginal tinkering proposed by Kemi Badenoch isn’t going to get a handle on it, Labour certainly has no answers, and without more aggressive repatriation policies, we could soon see the day when every major city is in flames. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that coming.

As predicted by just about everyone who follows fringe politics, amidst Ukippy infighting, Ben Habib has thrown in the towel and Advance UK is apparently no more. As I understand it, he is now making overtures towards Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, despite having called them racist. Consequently, there’s a row over on X over whether he should be given any formal standing in the party.

That row is rather instructive since Rupert Lowe is being urged to expel the infamous self-declared racist Steve Laws. There's a civil war going on in the ranks Restore Britain and I don't even think Rupert Lowe is aware of it because he doesn't think that deeply about ideology.

The online support base is heavily leaning towards ethnonationalism, while the casual membership is just anti-immigration (c)onservative (hardline civic nationalist ukippery). The former wants Restore to define explicitly as an ethnonationalist party - which the party won't do or it will alienate its casual membership. Meanwhile, the party will turn a blind eye to their worst excesses because it wants their activism. This Faustian pact cannot last.

Political parties can be broad churches. The Tory party has been a successful broad church comprising of libertarians, traditionalists and liberals because while there are some major disagreements, their ideology is still in the same ballpark where it matters. Parties cannot survive, though, when there is a fundamental ideological schism - with factions who actively dislike each other, and do not co-operate.

Ethnonationalists particularly are not ones to cooperate in that their quest for racial purity also requires a certain ideological purity. If you have them in your party, it's basically like having Hezbollah within your borders. They're just waiting to take over and impose their own doctrines. Similarly, they would rather blow it all up and start over than let it succeed without them. Unless you lock them out from the beginning, you've basically wheeled in a Trojan Horse. That's what Restore has done.

The ideological problem, though, is that median civic nationalist ideology only works for as long as minorities are small minorities with compatible culture. The window for that to work has been and gone. It was in ruins before the Boriswave but it's totally gone now. In these circumstances ethnonationalism is the only way to preserve Britain. Without the British peoples, Britain is just an airport lounge where foreign tribes compete for access to the welfare dispensary.

As ever, though, the problem isn't the ism. It's the ists. The online ethnonationalist fraternity are toxic people and for some reason, ethnonationalism walks hand in hand with ethnic economic collectivism, which metastasises into National Socialism with a hefty dose of antisemitism. Anyone vaguely well adjusted will cross the street to avoid such misanthropic people.

Moreover, these people are completely politically illiterate. If you set out what these people actually believe in a manifesto, it would trigger most people's gag reflex. Certainly the working class southern English tribe, who mingle with the Windrushers as family and friends, would find it utterly repellent. Tommy Robinson is their political totem, not Nick Griffin. Britain is not going to elect a far right party.

In fact, Rupert Lowe's wider popularity tells you this. Lowe himself is seen as an old, basically decent conservative gent who, like everyone else, is just at his limits with everything. On that basis, you *can* build a party that goes pretty hard on immigration, just not one pushing racially charged dogma. What's pushed so many people to their limits is seeing their welfare system and NHS abused, violating the basic British sense of fairness. Meanwhile, the clue is in the name of the party... Restore - which means to revert; to undo damage.

The short of it is, while there isn't a national ethnocentric consensus, you can sell the party on the basis of revoking welfare rights, banning foreign customs, kicking out criminals and illegals, and policies such as housing favouring those of British heritage.

While this is the policy shtick of Restore (as far as it goes), all of that gets lost in the noise if the party is represented by cranky extremists addled with American youtuber conspiracy theories. The party has to understand that there are more than 10m native people who are socially liberal conservatives, comfortably off, belonging to a powerful voter bloc who still get their news from the BBC and regards Churchill as a national hero. They're not going to vote for a pack of antisemitic lunatics and Swindonian incels. Reform understands this. Restore evidently doesn't.

Some argue that if Restore were to put policy guardrails up to keep the undesirables out then it would essentially be a different flavour of civic nationalism, much like Reform. That's true. It would be. But it would at least have the slightest chance of being electable - accomplishing most of what we all want. Restore was always going to be muscling in on Reform's turf. The way to compete is not on ideology, but consistency and competence.

That should have been quite easy for Restore in that Reform has no stated definition. It's based on vague populism, and has no codified policies to speak of - and thus cannot be trusted. Its key people are lightweight (often completely risible), and they can't get their message straight between them - and their candidates are crap. They have no plan for government, and they have zero attention to detail.

Restore should be presenting as a serious alternative with policies, message consistency, decent candidates, and a plan. But right now it's just *another* disorganised slopulist party with an emergent neo-Nazi problem that could blow up at any moment. With the party caught up in a dilemma as to whether to embrace Steve Laws or Ben Habib, Lowe’s party is scraping a hole through the bottom of the barrel. Increasingly, it looks like bald men fighting over a comb.

I’ve been following the fallout of the Nowak debacle on X. I think it’s fair to say that the police are wholly dysfunctional is the majority opinion. Most of the right has settled on DEI as the main culprit. Nobody really wants to think any deeper than that.

As I’ve outlined in previous posts, I think the problems go back further - to long before DEI even existed as a concept. It’s as much to do with the changing relationship between the public and the police, as police forces have retreated to centralised police fortresses. The Tories closed down hundred of local police stations, reducing policemen to glorified taxi drivers and booking clerks.

When you concentrated your organisation into one large building, you create the perfect environment for HR fads and political dogmas to thrive - especially in the public sector - and it’s a big part of why the NHS and civil service as a whole is dysfunctional.

Turning this around is no small undertaking. It’s going to require much better leadership and better intellectual direction - which is in short supply, especially when the universities are indoctrination camps and ground zero for most of the worst ideas in circulation. A lot of our systemic problems are not going to be solved in a hurry. If you want to fix the police or the civil service, the first priority for any government is to take a wrecking ball to higher education.

Meanwhile, the police have been subordinated to the race relations industry. The racial grievance industrial complex must be shut down. We must defund the NGOs, scrap any notion of "community leader", and shut down sociology & politics departments in universities. They are mainly storage warehouses for overqualified and under-skilled middle class leftists.

Some of the Peter Hitchens ilk suggest we need “back-to-basics” policing - stripping police uniforms back to the traditional blazer and truncheon but I don’t think that’s the solution. Police could at one time depend on the authority their uniform conveyed, but that was in a time when Britain was largely a homogenous high trust society. The urban multi-cultural environment in which migrant cohorts have scant regard to British law, means that police necessarily have to be equipped for all eventualities. Policemen have a basic expectation of making it through their shift alive.

Cutting to the chase, though, the biggest problem with the police is that they are too are too thinly stretched, with too broad a remit - having to perform as detective, peacekeeper, social worker and paramedics. For that you need sharp, fit and capable people - and to recruit those kinds of people you need rigorous selection and to make it a prestigious role worth competing for. Than means substantially better pay. But, of course, we know how that goes. We need to spend more on just about everything, and the police are just one among many competing priorities.

The police, though, are just one pillar of law and order. In order to take the police seriously we have to be able to take the system seriously - which is less likely when the courts are badly degraded and the prison service is in a state of perpetual emergency. As such, pledging to put more bobbies on the beat only goes so far. We must rebuild the magistrates courts closed down by the Tories, build more prisons and get the private sector out of prisons.

If you ask me, though, the whole issue once again comes down to immigration. You cannot expect to maintain order in a fragmented multicultural society. Asking the police to tread lightly around cultural sensitivities is setting them up to fail.

The erosion of the police as a functioning entity goes back to the 1980s. They were tasked with policing foreign communities they had no knowledge of, and didn’t understand, that necessarily required the development of “community networks” and “community leaders” as a public interface - and it metastasised from there.

Police and local authorities could not impose “British values” on third world rural peasantry, so compromises had to be made just to keep order - and they’ve been plate-spinning ever since. What you then get is disparate groups lobbying for their own concessions, while police commanders attempt to ensure it’s evenly policed according to the principles of neutrality. It could never withstand the weight of all the contradictions, and now it’s all breaking down.

The bottom line is that multiculturalism doesn’t work, and was never going to work. The only way out of this is to ensure that the rule of law applies to everyone equally, and come down hard on anyone who can’t live with that - regardless of their cultural sensibilities. There’s only one reason politicians haven’t already conceded the obvious - and it’s pure moral cowardice - putting their heads in the sand and hoping it would all come right.

Consequently, without political leadership and moral support, the police have been hung out to dry - constantly berated and slandered for doing an impossible job. It was only a matter of time before they completely lost the trust of the public.

The riots we saw this week are the culmination of all this. Public trust has been abused and squandered - and we now see the beginnings of white sectarianism. From there, there is no recovery - and any hope of rebuilding a functioning civic identity is dead. We are then on a countdown to civil war.

There’s only one guaranteed way to restore the kind of order that makes for the harmonious society we used to know, and that’s to start the mass removal of people who should never have been allowed here in the first place. For as long as we’re still pretending that multiculturalism can work, the problems are only going to spiral further out of control.

The upshot of the Nowak murder is that white people in Britain can no longer count on the protection of the police. It removes all doubt that the police are completely politicised and that Brits are second class citizens in their own country. But then many of us were not in any doubt to begin with.

The fallout is already following a highly predictable pattern and much of the commentary draws comparisons between how the politicians reacted to the death of George Floyd and how they reacted to this case.

Today, though, the anger boiled over. A protest in Southampton, later attended by Tommy Robinson and Lawrence Fox, with Farage opportunistically getting in on the act (rather unconvincingly) calling for “pure cold rage". The protest then turned into (actual) far-right thuggery and rioting.

The riot will be condemned by Starmer as far right thuggery, and this time, he’ll be absolutely right. I’ve seen a few faces in the crowd I recognise who are far right by anybody’s definition (people who want to deport all brown people and Jews), and their actions are indeed thuggery. One of the rioters is seen sporting a Restore Britain t-shirt and a skinhead. Some of the local Poles are also in on it.

The problem for Starmer, though, is that he’s the boy who cried wolf, and has long since lost any moral high ground. Having had Lucy Connolly jailed for a mean tweet, I don’t suppose anyone will particularly care if they are far right thugs. The SDP is what happens when all the sensible and nice people play by the rules - and that doesn’t seem to get us anywhere.

Meanwhile Wes Streeting devoted the day to talking about Gaza, while his fellow back benchers devoted the day to trans rights. Andy Burnham seems to have gone into hiding. We have had, however, the customary condemnation from Shabana Mahmood, in which she remarks:

The scenes this evening in Portswood are completely unacceptable. The Nowak family made a powerful call to us all yesterday to not let Henry’s death be used to create further division, hatred or tension. There can be no justification for hijacking this tragedy to stir up violence and disorder. Those responsible can expect to face the full force of the law. I thank the police who have tonight shown great bravery and calm in the face of disgraceful violence directed at them.

Regardless of the Nowak family’s “powerful call”, they don’t get a say in how the British people react to the politicisation and misconduct of the police force they pay for. Mahmood says “there can be no justification for hijacking this tragedy” but if we’re not supposed to mobilise politically over this, then when are we?

For sure, there is some hijacking. Farage, for instance, was going through the motions, mainly to stave off Restore. As ever, his performance was perfunctory. Put 50p in him and point him at the nearest camera. All the same, there is every justification for taking issue with police conduct and the political indifference.

To an extent, much of the outrage has been manufactured, There is a whiff of inauthenticity about this, but there are times when the pot needs to be stirred. We’re becoming so accustomed to this sort of thing that we barely even react to it most of the time. It’s just par for the course in modern “multicultural” Britain. I might even venture that the odd riot is warranted just to remind the powers that be that we do actually notice.

In this, Mahmood actually makes the point. “Those responsible can expect to face the full force of the law”. I believe her. Meanwhile if you happen to be a Moslem and assault a police officer at the airport, or drive through London with loudhailers shouting “rape their daughters”, the authorities are far less animated.

The protest itself, though, was probably more significant than the riot. The concept of “anti-white racism” has firmly landed, as you can see from the following footage…

Essentially, this is the first overt sign of white ethnic sectarianism. If it wasn’t already dead, this is the day we can mark in history when any residual civic national identity died a death. The lines are drawn alone ethnic lines - and from here, Sikhs will no longer be see as good immigrants - especially when they enjoy a de facto exemption from knife laws. Meanwhile, the police have completely lost the confidence of the public.

There will be much to deconstruct in the following days, not least the politics of ethnoreligious legal exemptions. There are then interesting dilemmas for Kemi Badenoch’s Cultural Cohesion and Integration Commission. By what measure can Punjabi turban wearers who carry knives as part of their daily attire be considered integrated, or even British for that matter?

Traditionally, Sikhs have been viewed as basically ok, but in recent times as the social fabric of Britain disintegrates, younger Sikhs are looking to their own ethnic heritgae for a sense of identity and belonging, and we will see the integration process go into reverse, much like Moslem immigrant cohorts. When Moslems and Sikh youth gangs eventually go at each other, Sikhs having tacit permission to arm themselves is going to be something of a problems. There’s is enough to keep pundits and columnists scribbling for at least three weeks.

But then, as we know, it all soon goes back to normal. As when a psychotic African slaughtered three baby girls, nobody was ever really held accountable and no lessons were learned. We all just went back to tweeting. This might dent Labour’s polling and may influence the outcome of the Makerfield by-election, but institutionally, nothing will change. Nothing ever does. The country is just that little bit more demoralised and fragmented - until the next time.

Meanwhile, we see that the political parties of the right are unable to capitalise on this in any useful way. In a BBC interview, Zia Yusuf was asked "what needs to happen now?", for which he did not have compelling answers. He rightly noted that the religious exemptions on knives must end along with the dismantling of "anti-white racism", but this requires a much more in-depth analysis because we have to recognise that the state the police are in is the culmination of decades of political meddling, demoralisation, centralisation, and bureaucratisation. It may even take decades to reverse.

In recent years the police have become a bloated, corporatised unresponsive bureaucracy, that actively deters serious people form joining, in favour of bland functionaries who cannot think for themselves. The force is in the midst of a serious retention crisis meaning that the rank and file have very little in the way of experienced supervision, while the senior ranks shape their forces to a political agenda because political narrative conformity is the path to promotion.

What you then have is a neutered police force, afraid of its own shadow, where every decision is micromanaged and scrutinised and officers have to watch what they say and what they think, in public and in private - where even something as basic as professional banter can be career ending.

We then have the disgusting spectacle of Chief Constables insulting their own commands by branding their force "institutionally misogynist and racist". Officers then have to work under greater surveillance than the citizens of East Germany.

What you then have, is a court system that works on the presumption that the police are racist, and criminals have learned how to exploit liberal anti-racism dogma to insulate themselves from punishment. We've seen exactly the same in schools where teachers are no longer confident of imposing discipline in fear of having a parental complaint to deal with.

Anyone with half a brain will not stick around in a dangerous, often tedious job, to then be a political functionary saddled with endless compliance paperwork, when they can make more money and work fewer hours doing virtually anything else.

While we very much do need to shitcan the College of Policing and purge wokery from the system, most of the rot predates these political HR fads, and much of the problem stems from a police force that has lost its way, lost any concept of what they are actually for, and amalgamated to the point where they have little knowledge of the communities they notionally serve. They spend half their shift either driving around a massive patch or waiting in the detention centres to fill out forms. They are glorified delivery boys and taxi drivers, occasionally expected to be paramedics, social workers, riot control and community outreach worker.

With the system as rotten as it is, nobody serious would want to be a copper, which is why we're seeing police who are too young, too naïve, and too indoctrinated - lacking supervision and too stupid to be let out on their own. You then get to a point where the arrival of moronic plod stands to exacerbate already tense and dangerous situations - which is exactly what's happened in the Nowak case.

What you need is seasoned grown-ups and a system that has their backs. You can't have that if the ground troops have their every decision second guessed and evaluated for political conformity.

I was recently arrested for posting a meme on X. What staggered me was not so much the arrest. It was that nobody in the chain of command questioned the stupidity of driving halfway across the county in the middle of the night to put someone in a cage for posting an anti-Hamas meme. The entire force is intellectually subnormal and nobody had the gumption to push back on it, probably because it wasn't worth the political argument. That's how we got where we are today, with jobsworth coppers too afraid to put their heads above the parapet.

As such, when a politician is asked "what needs to happen now", if we are to take them seriously, we need better answers than the ones given by Zia Yusuf. I doubt Restore Britain will have anything more intelligent to say. As such, we shouldn’t expect real and lasting change, regardless of who wins the next election.

I’m going to assume you are familiar with the particulars of the Henry Nowak incident. It is THE story on social media.

On 3 December 2025, 18-year-old University of Southampton finance student Henry Nowak, who was walking home after a night out in the Portswood area of Southampton, was stabbed five times in the chest and abdomen by 23-year-old local resident Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh. Digwa used a 21cm ceremonial kirpan knife that he carried, notionally as part of his faith. Nowak died at the scene.

Digwa claimed self-defence, alleging that the victim had racially abused him, punched him, and knocked off his turban, but the jury rejected this account after bodycam footage showed Digwa falsely accusing the dying Nowak of attacking him, leading police to initially handcuff the victim. Digwa was convicted of murder and carrying a bladed article; his mother, Kiran Kaur, was convicted of assisting an offender by hiding the weapon.

At his sentencing on 1 June 2026 at Southampton Crown Court, Digwa received a life sentence with a minimum term of 21 years. During the hearing, a man in a turban stood up and shouted “RACIST” at the judge. The judge told Digwa he had brought shame upon his family, community, and religion. The case has also prompted an ongoing IOPC investigation into the initial police response.

The more details emerge, the more infuriating it is, and the more damning it looks. Once again it shows the police up as operationally neutered, and more concerned with racism or alleged racism than any other offence. For me, it just meant being thrown in in a cage for posting a meme on X, but this time it’s cost a young man his life.

Meanwhile, it puts to bed any notion that Sikhs are integrated. Integrated migrants do not carry daggers. It is yet more evidence that ethnic minorities are a law unto themselves and multiculturism encourages and enables it.

So far as I can see X, though, most people tweeting about it don't really care who Nowak was or where he was from. Though he’s of Polish origin, he is one of us so far as the online right is concerned. He's just the latest Lee Rigby mascot to exploit for political purposes (quite rightly - because it most certainly is political). So far as the ethno-right is concerned he was one of “our people" because he was white - and because his murderer was brown. The failure of the police is merely an aggravating factor.

This, we can assume, is the beginnings of whites playing the sectarian game. And why wouldn't we? It seems to work for every other ethnicity. Any which way you look at it, the civic national identity is evaporating, rainbow multiculturalism is dead, and the police have obliterated any residual public trust.

Repairing this, though, is going to require more than just populist slogans like "scrap DEI". It's going to require a meticulous reworking of law and codes of practice, a complete clear out of the command level, a change of incentives and a structural overhaul, reversing the amalgamations that turned our police forces into bloated and faceless bureaucracies.

As they say, a fish rots from the head, and we can find several examples of police commanders insulting their command by branding their own forces as “institutionally racist”. Command staff are HR drones who openly insult their own force - and are lavishly praised and handsomely rewarded for doing so.

Meanwhile, one can't help but notice that the ground troops tend to be young, naïve, and without proper adult supervision. Even the midranking plod are pretty low calibre. It's going to require a completely new teaching syllabus and we're going to have to drag seasoned coppers out of retirement somehow, to teach the institution how to do the job again.

While there is a lot of focus on DEI, we didn't get here overnight and it won't be repaired overnight. The cultural rot is the culmination of decades of demoralisation and dysfunction - causing experience police to leave in droves. We need policies to improve retention, and to reward experience properly so good police stay on the beat rather than seeking promotion into command and management.

Most of all, police have to be empowered to act. All to often we see brave coppers doing the right thing only to find themselves in front of an inquiry board, while their own commanders and local politicians throw them under the bus. If we want good police, we have to have their backs.

Home Office statistics show a record number of officers are working in professional standards departments. There are more police staff tasked with looking into the suspected misconduct of colleagues than monitoring repeat offenders in the general population. This is politicisation of the police. A complete overhaul is required.

The other part of this is fixing the courts - reversing the mass closure of magistrates courts. For as long as the courts are enabling ethnic minorities to play the race card, they embolden race-grifting criminals who feel entirely safe in challenging the authority of the police.

I could go on at length, but if political parties want to be taken seriously, they have to set out in detail what they will do to fix this problem - and it needs to be detailed to prove that they understand what is happening and why.

While pundits will no doubt focus on the race aspect of this tragic debacle, what’s happened here is symptomatic of a fundamentally broken police, and is just one example among far too many, indicating that the fixation with not wanting to be called racist interferes with their primary duty to protect the public. It is the reason thousands of young girls were raped and abused and it’s the reason Henry Nowak is dead. This cannot stand.

While not by any means an official source, the above tweet from Lance Forman is instructive. Lowe has distanced himself from Steve Laws and antisemitism. This is the part where Restore’s nationalist support base throw their toys out of the pram and insist that Restore is "cucked by zionists" or something equally retarded. Ironically, that might just be enough to revive Restore's fortunes.

Meanwhile, The Spectator has just released an interview with Rupert Lowe, in which he makes it clear his Party is not built on ethnonationalism. “There was this spate of accusations of ethnonationalism and all this sort of rubbish, I can assure you the actual structure of the party has none of that in it”. Hopefully his lieutenants get the memo.

This is actually quite significant. It's the closest Lowe has come to explicitly defining the ideology of Restore Britain (something that should have been done from the get-go specifically to deter disruptive cranks). Now the job is to firm up whatever it is the party does stand for. That means a bit of message discipline - and radio silence until they've got their ducks in a row.

Of itself, I don't find ethnonationalism objectionable. It's all the horseshoe nationalism and socialist bollocks that goes with it that makes sensible people run a mile. Once you throw in the rabid, paranoid antisemitism (and the nasty crackpot activism it attracts) it starts to look a lot like neo-nazism and you simply cannot build a mainstream party with those people in the mix (even if you're pretending they're not there). Rupert Lowe was always going to have to have to put up ideological guide rails here or watch his party disintegrate into a mess of infighting and disastrous PR.

For those who wanted Restore to be an explicitly ethnonationalist party, you should recall that you had one not so long ago, but decided to blow it all up in favour of putting stickers on lamp posts. Nobody owes you a political home. Go build your own.

For my part, I don't see any point in the purity spiral because if the platform rests on serious policy then a hardline civnat manifesto is practically identical to a sensible ethnonationalist prospectus (which is what Kenny Smith, to his credit, was trying to build). A compromise could have been built around a system of principles but that could only function if the ethnonat contingent was willing to tone down the rabid Jew hate - which was always beyond their abilities.

Consequently, Restore will have to compete on hardline NatCon civnattery (which is entirely acceptable) - only the problem is that its too close to Reform's turf. The way to disambiguate from Reform was to compete on quality of policy and competence. But a year down the line is looks every bit as much the slop party that Reform is. They can't say they weren't warned. Ultimately, Uncle Rupe is just as much the slop merchant as Farage, and periodic policy papers by Harrison Pitt is not going to change that - nor will it make up for their dire candidates.

While today is something of a watershed for Restore, so that well adjusted people can join with some degree of confidence, overcoming the credibility problem is the next mountain to climb. For that to happen, Lowe is going to have to take his role as leader much more seriously, tone down the slop-tweeting, and let policy inform his messaging. I’m not holding my breath - but stranger things have happened.

It’s all kicking off over on X. Reform and Restore activists are at each other’s throats, ripping chunks out of each other in fierce competition over the Makerfield by-election. For me it’s an entirely passive form of entertainment because any residual hope of either of them getting their act together evaporated some weeks ago.

Many lament this infighting but I think it’s healthy. It's good for democracy for all the parties to be exposing each other. Let no-one go into the next general election harbouring the misapprehension that any of them are good. This is especially true for this by-election in that neither party has been able to field a vaguely passable candidate. The Reform candidate is a sexist prick and the Restore candidate is dimmer than a ten watt black lightbulb with a coating of dust.

If we’re generous, we can give Restore some leeway, by way of being a new party. Personally I don’t think that holds. Rupert Lowe was convinced he could do the job better than Farage. That Reform, meanwhile, is still struggling to find passable candidates points to more serious problems in Farage’s organisation. At this point, Reform needs to win every by-election.

If Reform does lose, they’ll blame Restore for splitting the vote, but the bottom line is that they failed to find a high profile quality candidate who could beat Andy Burnham - and that’s on them alone. No party is entitled to a clear run at a seat, and there’s no reason why Lowe should cut Farage any slack.

In the grander scheme of things, I don’t think this by-election is anywhere as pivotal as some believe it is. For sure, Burnham is more popular than other Labour leadership contenders, but a few months in the job will soon strip the shine off him. Labour is a zombie party and leadership is only half the problem.

If anything, this by-election is a test of whether Restore has an interim future. It must tally at least four thousand votes to land as a serious competitor, otherwise it’s an also-ran fringe party. A nuisance to Farage, but not a show-stopper.

Regardless, I do not see a long term future for Restore. Restore won't get big enough to implode the way Reform will. At absolute best, it will win roughly the same reputational clout as Reform circa 2024, prior to the reanimation of Farage (maybe able to win in a handful of strongholds, and enough to cost Reform a handful of seats) and will then tread water until it fades out of view the way Ukip has. Reform, until it fails in office, is the de factor insurrection party. That isn’t going to change.

Being generous, Restore could poll a million votes at the general election, at which point it buys itself a great deal more exposure and media scrutiny, and will then run into all the same problems as Reform because there are no unifying values, no fixed ideology, and any attempt to firm up something like a working ideological platform will have its own activists fighting like rats in a sack. They will duck the question completely, and be all over the shop the same way Reform is now, to end up a rabble of contradictory cranks (and ambitious egotists).

Insofar as there'll be a defining ideology, it is miles to the right of the median voter, at odds with the politics of their own leader, and the party is incapable of nurturing any new talent who won't be regarded either as a bit dim, or just downright unpleasant (or both). It could have insulated itself early on, but like Reform, they just didn't think firming up the basics before launching mattered all that much. They launched the aircraft with the intention of adding engines later.

While senior figures within the party are loosely describing Restore as "Nationalist" the party (taking after Lowe’s conservative instincts) will eventually be decried by their own nationalist support base as containment. "Nationalist" in Britain does have an agreed definition, which is inherently socialist and profoundly antisemitic. At that point, you are in horseshoe territory where you have more in common with the freaks on the far left. Meanwhile you'll have the official Rupert Lowe account churning out risible hang-em and flog-em slop which will cement Restore as a completely unserious party.

With Reform also descending into shambles, it might just be enough for right-leaning voters to wearily accept that middle of the road Toryism is the closest they will get to stable government, and Badenoch's successor will reel them in. Put simply, too many of the fundamentals in both Restore and Reform are too broken to ever make for a viable government. On present trajectory, Farage doesn't even last as long as Starmer if he gets in at all. A serious party might be able to pick up the pieces, but that's not going to be Uncle Rupe's clown car.

As it happens, I'm told that Lowe doesn't even run his own X account. I'm not sure I believe it, but either way, he is an absentee landlord. He's not leading. Slop-tweeting isn't proper ideological direction, and its not joined up with any policy-making. It almost feels like he's washed his hands of that kind of intellectual leadership and has outsourced it to his junior lieutenants who are inexperienced and in a world of their own. They tend to pander to the online nationalist crowd, who are paranoid about "zionist infiltration". And that's not the only problem.

There's an informal alliance with the Swindon manbaby whose Lotus Eaters media platform is calibrated to American audiences, who in turn are influenced by a zoo of American YouTubers. As such, Uncle Rupe's zoomer following is absolutely addled on a politics that is not in any way reflective of British sentiment, which is a complex blend of social conservatism and free enterprise, but also elements of socialism in its proper place. This lot genuinely think they are representative of the silent majority, when in fact their policies is very niche, very online, and repellent to the median British voter.

The right, in my view, is only going to prosper with a sane, genuinely centre-right party (but one that is deadly serious about immigration and demographics). As soon as you go wading into murky nationalist waters, you're in with a pretty shady bunch. For sure, they might have massive social media reach, but much of it is international - and has next to zero bearing on elections. They're also pretty shitty people. You'll see them get more abusive as time goes on.

Essentially, Rupert Lowe's personal politics are quite close to what the British right-leaning voter wants, but his party is running its own hustle - and I doubt Lowe is even aware of the shifting tides in his own party. But here's the thing... It won't go unnoticed. Mainstream political columnists have already seen Restore's true colours, and word will get out. Shire Tories might like the cut of Rupert's jib, but they won't vote Restore if it doesn't past the sniff test.

As to Makerfield, in a just world, Andy Burnham would be humiliated in this by-election. A careerist swooping into bail out a Labour party in its death throes ought to be viewed as a pretty cynical stitch-up, but in choosing such a dire candidate, Farage may have already handed the game to Labour, with or without Restore in the mix.

Two policy announcements out of the Reform stable today. One is Farage's bizarre tax policy which is already falling apart, and the second... a more considered look at the structure of the civil service. The first is obviously a slop populist policy, but it is officially sanctioned policy for the moment... until Farage shit-cans it because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. That's how this works. It's now a long tradition for any Farage-led enterprise.

The second policy, meanwhile, is not officially sanctioned as I understand it. Kruger has some licence to speak for Reform, but his work could just as easily vanish into the ether in the event of a Reform government. It might even cause him to quit. It wouldn't be the first time someone has been labouring under the illusion that their policy work would contribute to a more serious policy platform, only to dicover they're completely expendable.

Kruger's efforts have attracted a lot of praise from the libertarian Tory crowd but you're talking about people with an ideological aversion to government, and would wish to prune it down to as close to nothing as possible, regardless of what they actually want it to do.

Taking the two policies in tandem, though, gives us some indication of what a Reform government looks like. Armed the the lofty assumption that everyone in the civil service is a lazy woke lanyarder, they will shred all ongoing administration before they've given any thought as to what they will do with power. Then insofar as that thinking goes, it will be about as shallow and unworkable as Farage's income tax brainfart.

What you'll then get is a new class oof crony super-spad, intended to be elite private sector experts, who will have no idea how to get results out of large, amalgamated governmental organisations. They will end up leaning heavily on their senior civil servants (the ones who haven't been given their marching orders) who will be deemed obstructive for pointing out certain technical and legal realities said super-spads will have no concept of. It will lead to much the same implementation logjams and will continue to blame civil service "intransigence".

Central to this mythmaking is the likes of Dominic Cummings who was never likely to accomplish meaningful reforms on account of his abysmal temperament, but the civil service is not to blame for fourteen years of Tory failure.

A large part of the reason Reform has any momentum at all is because the Tories did nothing with their massive majority and mandate. Brexit was not thwarted by the deep state. Ultimately, EU regulatory systems are complex areas of governance, and if you're going to reform things like agriculture, fishing, planning, asylum and energy, then you need a deep understanding of how the system currently works and what you want to transition to. But nobody did that work, least of all anybody in Vote Leave or Farage's Ukip. The policy cupboard was bare. There was no will to diverge from the EU baseline because nobody had any considered ideas of how things should otherwise work. That was too much like effort.

In all probability, in the event of a Reform government, we will see a repeat of the Boris Johnson episode, where most of the easy hit slop policies don't survive first contact with reality, and everything else turned out to be far more complicated than they ever imagined, and having pruned a lot of civil service expertise, they'll have to shelve half of their agenda. Coupled with the legal and administrative chaos of leaving the ECHR, and you'll rapidly see a government far out of its depth, chasing ideological outcomes, while unable to make any practical difference to anything.

I'm of the view that the shape of the civil service should not be dictated by ideology. It should be informed by policy. As I've illustrated many times, getting a grip on something like illegal immigration requires tiers of joined up policy and routine local authority enforcement. That might necessarily require an expansion of the overall Home Office headcount. Though in this instance, if you wanted to reduce the Whitehall headcount, you'd be better of looking at strengthening local authorities and returning their enforcement headcount to 2005.

Danny Kruger, though, is putting the cart before the horse, dreaming up new arrangements of deckchairs before thinking about what a Reform government wants to achieve. He's latching on to fashionable narratives about purging quangos, which ultimately leads to more amalgamations and ministry bloat, with less overall departmental transparency, haemorrhaging expertise in the process - leaving a mess his super-spad drinking buddies can't sort out.

Essentially, we're looking at a lame-duck government within two or three years, while leaving Whitehall in an even bigger mess than they found it, with civil servants having to impose their own kind of order just to get anything done.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you believe the civil service is the root of the problem. I don't. There are some egregious creatures in the senior ranks who should be shown the door, but it again comes down to GIGO. If parties don't bother with the technical details of policy, and churn out any old eye-catching slop, they simply cannot be surprised if they are unable to implement any of it when in office - and voters start to look elsewhere.

Writing in Conservative Home, Lee Cain says it is time to face reality - Kemi Badenoch is failing as leader. The party is in a worse position than when she took over and there are no signs of recovery. This seems to a universal way of thinking about British politics. If a party is failing then the leader is the problem.

I would venture that Kemi Badenoch isn’t the problem. In fact, she is the perfect person to lead the Tory party right now. She is more robustly right wing than the Tory party median, she’s presentable, superficially likeable, and sensible where it matters. It’s just that middle-of-the-road conservatism has nothing to offer. It’s the answer to the 2010 pre-Boriswave question. Right now, her policy commission is beavering away on integration issues surrounding immigration, when we are twenty years past the point where integration polices could have worked.

Fundamentally, much like her party, Badenoch believes Britain’s problem is a managerial competence problem, where the same paradigm can work if only more qualified people were in charge. Even if the lady does think a more radical change is required, she has pushed it as far as her party will let her. That is the central problem. It’s a completely obsolete party. She thus has two choices.... either to compete directly with Reform or come up with something new and better. The former is redundant while the latter is simply beyond their imaginations.

One commenter on X has it that “The party's strategy leans heavily on Kemi’s personal credibility - the idea that the leader has changed, therefore the party has changed. This undersells the institutional overhaul. And probably under-values the importance of this overhaul. Voters who mentally checked out after years of broken promises aren't watching leadership profiles. They're not parsing conference speeches for signals. They need to be told directly, repeatedly, that the mechanisms of betrayal have been removed”.

The problem, though, is that the party is still comprised of the same people and the change of mindset required is too big an ask of them. To survive, the party would have to move to a position of National Conservatism, roughly where James Orr is politically, and that simply cannot include the likes of James Cleverly and the Conservative Environment Network types.

More to the point, I don’t think it really matters what the Tory party does now. The right wing herd instinct has abandoned the Tory party now. Reform, for all its problems, is now the mainstream vehicle of the right. It has a momentum all of its own, and it is the de facto anti-politics vote.

There remains the question of whether Reform is capable of becoming a coherent party and staying the course in office, but that is a secondary question. Voters want change and seemingly any change is better than no change. On that basis, most of Reform’s inherent problems are already priced in. Voters know what Farage is (a sleazy chancer) but they don’t care. They are not voting for Farage. They are voting to clear out the stables.

There’s a lot we could say against Reform. Its lack of proper candidate vetting, the lack of a policy platform, and the lack of seriousness means that Reform will have many of the same problems as the Tories when it reaches office, and its drift to the centre risks alienating its own base - suggesting that the Reform lifecycle will closely follow that of Johnson’s Tories. All of that, though, not reason enough for supporters to give up on Reform. It is what it is. It’s a moon-shot - and with the lack of viable alternatives, it’s the only game in town - and Reform knows it too.

That, though, is why history will repeat, and it’s a big part of why politics is falling apart. The consistent message form the parties, regardless of their many shortcomings, is “who else are you going to vote for?”. That’s the very arrogance and complacency that played midwife to Reform in the first place.

Regular readers will know my view that Reform will rapidly hit the rocks in office. When your agenda is based on half-baked populist tropes and you underestimate the political complexity of implementing your ideas, you are setting yourself up for failure. While it is true that Reform is now putting a policy apparatus together, they are still working on the same collection of assumptions, and for my part, I think they’ve left it too late, and they’re not approaching it the right way.

For starters, policy development takes time - which is time they don’t have. I don’t think Labour can limp on all the way to 2029 but even on that timetable, they’ve run out of time to pin down the details of policy. As I understand it, Reform has cast a wide net for policy ideas, essentially compiling a wish list of fantasy executive orders, when what’s needed is a structured, joined-up policy platform.

Even if this were widely understood, though, I still don’t think it would impact Reform’s electoral prospects. Even at their dysfunctional worst, they couldn't possibly be worse than the establishment parties, and we’re now at a point where if they pull off just two or three of their headline ambitions (such as ending Indefinite Leave to Remain and shit-canning Net Zero) then it’s a step forward.

In terms of fixing the country long term, I don’t think Reform would get anywhere close, in that most of our problems require a multi-agency strategic approach but the first job, as far as voters are concern is just to arrest the decline.

If we do want to fix the country, we have to be thinking about the political opportunity created when Reform inevitably implodes. While there is still no chance of establishing a new Reform alternative, the fringes can still set the mood music. It’s possible that, post-2029, the Tories under new leadership would recover, running on a platform of policy competence (fixing Reform’s mess). But there is still a gap in the market for something more robust.

Many hoped that something might be Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, but presently, it’s a party in direct competition with Reform, and it isn’t meaningfully different. Right now, the only way it could galvanise as something distinct is to become a hardline nationalist entity, counter to Lowe’s conservative instincts, while pandering to very online right wingers who aren’t very bright, and aren’t very nice. At that point, you’re fishing in the antisemitic national socialist end of the pond. If you have those people representing you then you are doomed.

While Restore Britain promised to be something more serious than Reform, there’s no evidence that it is. Sporadic policy papers don’t make it a serious organisation, and from the looks of it, Lowe is having trouble finding the elite class of candidates he envisaged.

That part doesn’t surprise me, actually. I used to complain about the low calibre of people in politics, lamenting the lack of big beasts and heavy hitters, but the cold truth is that they don’t exist. We look at the the past with rose tinted glasses, and if social media existed back in the day, with instant fact checking at our disposal, the politicians of yore, whom we regard as political titans, would look just as shifty and out of their depth as they do today. As such, the search for this elite cadre is a quest for a mythical holy grail.

The closest we have to anything I would consider a serious political party (that I would join) is the SDP, in that it does have an intellectual foundation, decent people, a guiding philosophy, and it does make a half-decent stab at policy. With persistence, it might be a political force sometime in the distant future. Stranger things have happened.

For the time being, though, Reform is the baseball bat of choice for the electorate to give the establishment parties a hammering. Certainly, if voters want to sabotage Andy Burnham’s career ploy, Reform is the means to do it, and vote-splitting breakaway parties will not be viewed favourably if they hand the game to the enemy.

While Hell would have to freeze over before I endorsed a party led by Nigel Farage, I don’t dispute the voter instinct that propels Reform to the top of the polls. In ordinary times there would be an inherent ceiling on Reform’s lazy populism, but it’s impossible to overstate just how hated the old parties are, or the appetite for removing them. Until the toxin is purged, Reform is here to stay. Everything else is a niche distraction.

A political declaration aimed at clarifying key aspects of the European convention on human rights was published on Friday, agreed by all 46 member states of the Council of Europe.

The new declaration is not a rewriting of human rights law (which would take years) - but is a political signal from all the member states to human rights judges that there needs to be greater consideration for public interest and democracy when deciding on migration cases.

It was signed by the 46 members of the Council of Europe, the political body which oversees the human rights court and is entirely separate to the European Union. The document says pressures facing European countries have either changed significant or were unforeseen at the time the human rights convention was drafted. It states have "the undeniable sovereign right" to establish their own immigration policies and remove foreign nationals in the public interest.

There is now more wriggle room for the interpretation of key aspects of migrant-related human rights law. The Chișinău declaration, agreed in the Moldovan capital, is not legally binding but it does put courts under significant pressure to apply the law more restrictively in asylum and immigration cases.

This is politically significant because it says nobody in Europe will or should uphold fictional standards invented by British judges, and that parliament can legislate accordingly without fear of being taken to Strasbourg.

Cynics on the British right are not convinced this will make any difference and point to the fact that it is not legally binding, but they’re missing the point. While not an actual amendment to the ECHR or a ruling, this most certainly is an instrument of influence that judges are duty bound to take into account. Judges must consider the intent of law - and this declaration sets out the political parameters.

As I’ve gone to considerable lengths to point out, Britain's problem is less to do with the ECHR and more to do with a dysfunctional immigration tribunal system and liberal judges. This clarification means that if the problems persist, then the ECHR is being wilfully distorted by British judges and tribunals, and is a matter for domestic politics to resolve.

More than ever, I am of the view that the stated intention of the Tories and Reform to quit the ECHR is an unwelcome diversion, once again externalising domestic problems. Working on the presumption that Reform will form the next government, even as a partner in coalition, it will open up a can of constitutional worms, especially pertaining to Northern Ireland, when ultimately the problem is a wholly dysfunctional justice system and an institutionally corrupted Home Office.

The trap here is that any new administration will end up absorbed by constitutional wrangling and diplomatic rows, when it could be getting on with more pressing concerns, potentially even hobbling its own authority as it runs out of steam, and once again landing us with a lame duck government that fails to deliver on its promises.

The resignation of Keir Starmer is now just a formality. He has lost all his authority and credibility. He is now a squatter. He's done. Nobody wants him and nobody wants his party.

There was a time when this sort of thing would be a little be exciting and consequential. Everyone loves the intrigue of toppling a king and the jostling to replace him. But it now happens so often, it's about as exciting as taking your car to Kwik Fit for a new set of brake pads. It's not really money you want to spend, but will need doing eventually so you might as well do it before another big bill comes in.

As such, it's not really something we can get excited about. It's not as though we can hope for improvement, and even if any of the potential replacements showed any kind of promise, the job will soon rob them of their veneer of competence. Whatever freshness Burnham or Streeting might bring to the role will go stale within thirty days.

The issue here is that Labour has run its course, as a government and as a party. It cannot represent the majority working class in Britain because it doesn't identify with them on any level and doesn't even like them. In theory the party could revive its fortunes by listening to its traditional base, but would be torn down by its own activists if it did.

If you recall, the one time Starmer showed a little ankle with his "Island of strangers" speech, he had to walk it back within days. The party is held hostage to its lunatic fringes. It is caught between the dead ideology of Blairism and the malevolence of identity politics and socialism. To fully embrace either means certain death, so all it can do is tread water until it drowns. There are no lifelines here. The struggling swimmer is cramping up and nobody even wants to save them.

The party could and should do the decent thing here. Rather than subject Britain to another three years of rudderless procrastination, it should call a general election. But that means admitting failure and relinquishing power to people who will do what the electorate wants. And that, in their eyes is something that must be avoided at all costs. Fundamentally, the party now exists to obstruct the public will - and will do so by any means necessary. As such, Labour is an elected dictatorship. If Labour backbenchers had any decency whatsoever, they would resign their whip.

But, of course, decency doesn't come into it. We are ruled by a class of narcissistic, parasitic, talentless morons. Our only job as voters is to get rid of them at the first opportunity. We know this. They know this. Their extinction is now just a waiting game. Everything else is just a formality. All we can do is hope that the bond markets contain their excesses. That Reform doesn't especially present a solution to this malaise is another problem, but that's a problem for another day. The only priority for now is hammering Labour's coffin shut.

One thing the local elections did is cement Reform as the de facto anti-incumbent party. Their many shortcomings don't matter. Their one job is to hammer Labour and the Tories. If you look at Reform as a party in their own right, you will not see the makings of of a constructive government, but that's not what they are for. There's a broader sense that functioning government is too much to hope for, and a clear out is our only shot at refreshing the system.

That, of course, brings its own problems. You might recall when the SNP had a sudden Westminster influx comprised of novices, opportunists and crooks. I expect Reform will be the same, and similarly incapable. But that doesn't even matter at this point. It's already sunk as low as it can go. The chaos of amateurs isn't any worse that what we've had to endure.

For the last couple of years I'd studied Reform quite closely. I don't see the makings of a functioning government. Generic right wing populism and the politics of protest doesn't present any real long term answers. Their lack of preparedness will make it difficult to take on the establishment and the deep state and they will rapidly find themselves out of their depth, but the one function they could serve is to wreck things in such a way that they can never go back to how they were. It will be for future parties to bring some sort of order to it.

This is about as close as I come to endorsing Reform. I won't vote for them but I don't blame anyone who does. I hoped that an alternative would present itself, but that's a longer term hope now. I had high hopes for Restore on the basis of Lowe's critiques of Reform, but it turned out to be another populist slop party with similar definition problems, and a schizophrenic activist base that will tear it apart the moment there is any kind of ideological dilemma. Fringe parties seldom survive the factional infighting of their own supporters. As such, hopes of a new party are waning. It seems more likely that after two terms out of office, the Tory party might rediscover conservatism.

As such, the question is not what kind of government Reform will be, but what it makes space for when it inevitably fails. Reform certainly isn't a remedy to this protracted instability. A Farage premiership will last about as long as Starmer's did, and Reform without Farage is yet another rudderless rabble. It seems probably that Reform will split, with a large cohort defecting back to the Tories under new leadership, possibly even disintegrating entirely, seeing its hardcore support drift over to Restore, to establish a new era Ukippy party.

Essentially, political chaos is a the new normal for the foreseeable future. Reform will take power, install their friends and cronies, wreck everything they touch and fall apart. It's not optimal, but at the end of the day, wrecking everything is all that is required of it. For the rest, we just have to play it by ear. Something will turn up eventually.

The Telegraph lead editorial is a pretty good summary of the situation.

There was one thread uniting the disparate results of Thursday’s elections – a rejection of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer. In the party’s former heartlands in northern England, it suffered losses to Reform far greater even than the rout in the Red Wall under Jeremy Corbyn. On the Left, the Greens hoovered up votes from Muslims and the young, securing victories in places such as Hackney. In Wales, Labour support crumbled in areas central to the party’s founding mythology. Even the Tories managed a small number of victories against Sir Keir, notably in Wandsworth and Westminster in London.

Responsibility for the losses falls entirely on the Prime Minister. He should now go. He has shown himself to be singularly ill-suited to the demands of power. Starmerism as a political project was almost solely about saving Labour from Mr Corbyn. Sir Keir seemed a suitable figurehead for that effort – a reassuringly bland former chief prosecutor, with none of the fanaticism of his predecessor. But when he was swept into office in 2024 on the coattails of the collapse of the Tory vote, it soon transpired that there was very little more to him than that.

The Prime Minister had no strategy for government, no plan to deliver on his promises to the electorate. For almost two years, Britain has had a void where a leader should have been, at a time when all of the country’s pathologies – pitiful growth, squeezed living standards, fraying social cohesion, a culture of entitlement – have got worse, not better.

A merry-go-round of advisers in No 10 could not hide that this is a prime minister who has never known what he should do with his majority. A particularly telling moment in the Commons saw Sir Keir attest that he had no power to increase oil and gas exploitation in the North Sea because the “quasi-judicial duty of the legislation rests with the Secretary of State [Ed Miliband]”.

This perhaps explains why Sir Keir has failed to recover from his multiple U-turns and his broken promises. Voters know that governments sometimes have to take unpopular decisions. But the Prime Minister has been unable to explain what he is trying to achieve, and has run away from most of the hard choices he has been confronted with. The public has tired of the drift and indifference, combined with the suspicion that Sir Keir retains the instincts of a human rights lawyer rather than a national leader. But it is not just Reform or Tory supporters who want to see him go. He has alienated swathes of the Left, too.

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives have some cause for celebration, including their relatively strong performance in London. But they, too, have gone backwards in many of their former heartlands, losing ground to Reform in areas such as Essex.

The Tories still have a long way to go before they are taken seriously again as a potential government. But a new Labour prime minister – particularly one full of the fantasies of Left-wing economics – could present an opportunity. The promise of lower taxes and more efficient services is still compelling to voters exhausted by public sector waste.

But it will obviously be Nigel Farage of Reform who is feeling most buoyed. Once again, he has tapped into the insurgent forces that propelled Britain to Brexit, giving hope to voters who have come to believe that Labour and the Conservatives will never listen to them.

Mr Farage may now be feeling a temptation not unlike the one that confronted Sir Keir when he saw that Tory own-goals were going to hand him a majority by default. Indeed, Mr Farage could probably sit back and continue to reap the rewards of Labour’s collapse. Being studiously vague about how he would achieve his promises could prove a safer route to No 10. But he must be honest with the voters.

Everyone can see what needs to be done. The out-of-control welfare system must be reformed, with benefits cut significantly. Work has to be made to pay, and taxes on businesses and working people reduced. Illegal migration must stop, and deportations must rise. Red tape has to fall away and democratic accountability be restored to government. Net zero must go.

But Mr Farage now has to show in far more detail how he would achieve these things, and what he would do to surmount the obstacles that would inevitably stand in his way. Otherwise, he will be offering hope but little change. For an electorate that has grown so sick of broken promises, that would be a very dangerous combination.

Essentially, The Telegraph has noticed there is no plan behind Reform - a point this particular blog has been hammering since its inception. What The Telegraph hasn’t clocked, though, is that there won’t be a plan. That’s just not how Farage rolls.

One thing Reform has proven adept at is capitalising on the broad disaffection with politics, and has been the beneficiary of the voter rebellion, but it's still not winning by way of advancing a particular policy platform. Everything is triangulation for every scrap of electoral advantage, and that necessarily requires that Farage keeps it vague. Anything detailed might scare the horses. Having just won over a very large cohort of former Labour voters, he can’t now talk about savage cuts to welfare. As to what else the party might do, Farage has to be cautious not to look like yet another tory austerity party.

That then leaves us to guess what Reform is actually for. We know the rough ballpark on immigration policy (which stops far short of what is necessary) but we don't know much else. We can make educated guesses on the basis of things Zia Yusuf has said, but there's nothing bankable. I don't think Danny Kruger speaks with any authority on what a Reform government would do. We know they have vague plans for reforming the civil service (for what little that will accomplish), and they'll scrap Net Zero (as is necessary) but then they have to get down into the weeds of policy to repair the social contract. That means a series of hard choices and controversial decisions, and I honestly don't think they have the minerals.

Where it comes unstuck is their determination to leave the ECHR. This essentially requires a fundamental overhaul of the constitution, and I don't think they have the talent to pull it off in the face of a full-scale revolt by the media, the unions, the Lords, the blob etc. There's a lot of preparatory work that needs to happen before pulling the pin on ECHR exit, not least having a plan B for Northern Ireland. The right tends to prefer simplistic "rip off the band aid" approaches, but this process requires a level of intellect and sophistication that Reform simply doesn't have. They will likely create a political crisis for themselves within a year.

At that point, if not sooner, the cracks will begin to show. Key Reform figures aren't in agreement on very much. There is a rhetorical gulf on Islam between Pochin and Cunningham. There is nothing much ideologically to unite the disparate base comprised of Tories and lapsed Labour voters. As such, Reform will have to play it safe, thus there is no hope of them addressing the structural economic imbalances.

As it happens, I think we are still looking at a hung parliament and a Reform/Tory coalition, which comes with its own problems, and Reform may struggle to repeat their thumping victory in the locals as voters realise what they're getting when they vote Reform. Farage has used the local elections as a vehicle for national politics and now their councillors are fending for themselves with no direction or leadership.

Essentially, I don't see Reform putting an end to this period of political instability, or performing well enough to obtain a mandate in their own right following 2029. At best, they will temporarily arrest the decline, but could just as easily fall apart they way Labour and the Tories did in office. When there is no intellectual foundation, and nothing to unite them, they will very rapidly run out of steam, unable even to repair the messes they make for themselves. The chaos could even result in a massive swing to the left should something radical emerge out of the blue.

To my mind this is the reason people should be thinking about building alternatives for the long term. Rupert Lowe has already said he's off if his vanity party doesn't win in 2029 (of which there is zero chance), so that leaves the SDP as the only serious non-establishment party. Too much hope is invested in correcting the course of the nation in 2029, when all the signs point to a decade or more of political turbulence, to which no party really has any answers.

For my part, I honestly don't see a political solution emerging before things start to unravel on a more serious level. Even at peak performance, without walking into ambushes like ECHR withdrawal, I don't see any party of the right being sufficiently serious to repair things in time. We have to get used to this instability being the new normal.

Elections of any kind tend to trigger endless think pieces and hot takes, all of which I find achingly tedious. We’re still trotting out the same populist Brexity narratives about a great realignment - and even when they’re right, they’re still boring. It’s the same recycled shtick we’ve been reading since 2016. I think one of the reasons I have such an aversion to writing an analysis of the local elections is because I have an equal aversion to reading them. By now, you shouldn’t need me or anyone else to read the writing on the wall for you. I do find, though that Josh Hunt is a voice I make time for lately. This is his take…

After watching election coverage for two days, despite the nagging feeling I need to shower in bleach given the sheer amount of bs we've been bombarded with, here's my take on things...

This week Labour was hammered in the local elections. Starmer's favourability sits at -45 and the government's net approval is -49. Starmer has lost the public, and no series of bold calls, cabinet reshuffles or stern language is going to change that.

What's really striking to me, isn't that he's lost the public, that’s been clear for months. It's that there's no real plan for what comes next.

I feel like we’re heading towards a period of political paralysis. Labour still has a large majority in the HoC, but let’s be honest, in the general election Labour only managed 33% of the vote, which equates to about 1-in-5 voting age adults actually voting for them in the first place. So whilst electorally and legally, Labour has a mandate, it doesn’t in the ways that matter to voters… the trust, the belief, the sense that the country is actually being governed on its behalf. So there’s a major gap emerging between the government and the public.

So far there’s been no serious challenge from inside the party, and I believe that’s because there’s no obvious successor. So far some of the calls have been vague… “let’s give Starmer until Christmas”, which the more cynical among us will see as just a quiet manoeuvre to buy time in order to parachute Andy Burnham into a Westminster seat so he can, eventually, run for leader.

But let’s unpack that a little, because this is important.

Burnham isn't an MP. So to replace Starmer, a sitting Labour MP would first have to step aside and Burnham would then have to win the by-election. After a week in which Reform took Labour heartland councils, that's no longer a safe assumption. And I imagine Reform would be licking their lips at the prospect of a by-election designed to get a credible replacement for Starmer into Parliament. And assuming he wins (big if), there’d have to be a leadership challenge and eventual battle. Which would likely grind on for months.

And all of this would be happening with Iran at war, the economy softening, the cost-of-living spiralling, the gilt market questioning the country's financial credibility, and social tensions rising to a point where the country feels like a tinderbox.

The plan then, in other words, would be this… trigger a by-election, hope it holds, install a new leader without a public mandate, and call it stability.

That isn't stability. It's an admission that the current Prime Minister can't recover. It would be an admission that the parliamentary party can't produce a credible alternative from within and that the only route forward is a sequence of fragile gambles that all have to work, in order, for the strategy to land.

If a government has to go to these lengths just to find someone the public might tolerate, the question isn't who replaces Starmer. The question is why the country isn't being asked.

Of course, Labour members, MPs and supporters would say this is just speculation. And they’d be right, it is. But these are the questions going on in the minds of many now.

This is what paralysis looks like… a majority government that can't lead. It looks like a party that can't change direction without breaking its own rules. It looks like a public that has already moved on while Westminster argues about who gets to occupy a role the public no longer respects.

Of course, I'm not discounting the possibility that this all goes supernova over the coming weeks, and Prime Minister Rayner is in place to see us through to the next election. But I'm leaning towards paralysis for now.

In fairness, this isn’t just Labour. The widening gap is between Westminster and the country. And watching Nigel Farage speak last night, you really get a sense that Reform have picked up on that, and know how to use it.

As far as X goes, this analysis is about as good as it gets. Hunt is right in hinting that these results are not entirely Starmer’s fault. Labour was already a zombie party even when it took office. The electorate was already done with Labour and the fact they won the general election was an accident of numbers. Both Labour and the Tory party have been living on borrowed time for over a decade. I recall Brendan O’Neill pieces in the Telegraph over a decade ago talking about the empty charade of Westminster party politics. This is just the inevitable clear-out process that started with Brexit.

Hunt is also right in that what follows is political instability - and not just for the interim. Reform may be adept, as Hunt observes, at exploiting the disaffection in terms of winning votes, but Reform does not articulate a vision any more than Labour did. There is no unity of purpose behind Reform’s vote. All that's really changed electorally is that there is now a None Of The Above option. As such, we are seeing the completion of an electoral purge - but with no obvious end state.

You will get no argument from me that it was necessary and it’s been a long time coming, but the question on my mind is whether it actually gets us anywhere. Reform is doing its job of "smashing the uniparty" but there is no unified positive mandate for any particular agenda or manifesto. Nobody knows for sure what a Reform government would do - and we know that the things that need to be done are too rich for their blood.

Moreover, a broad coalition party like Reform has nothing to unite it. I don't see a Reform government playing out any differently to Johnson's Tories. At first will come the jubilation, but then comes the disintegration.

As it happens, this early success for Reform might be a liability since Reform clearly has no vetting process for local candidates, and the ideological make-up of the party at the local level will be as much a surprise to the leadership as everyone else. We will see a steady attrition of unsuitable individuals losing the whip. Reform councillors will be novices and opportunists who will struggle to do anything of note, which may sour Reform's prospects for 2029 - which still looks like hung parliament territory.

The point for me is that the destruction of uniparty creates a political vacuum but there is no force waiting in the wings to fill it. Certainly the "Green surge" isn't going to happen, not least because Moslems have noticed that Polanski is a degenerate - and the traditional Labour vote is going to Reform, which doesn't make for a functioning political vehicle in the long term, especially when its leadership are essentially liberal Tories. The party will stop far short of what needs to be done on immigration and will also stop short of making the necessary structural reforms to the NHS and the welfare state.

The question, therefore, is whether something can coalesce in time before Britain seriously starts falling apart. I don't think it can. There are no interim remedies and the levers that need to be pulled will remain unpulled, and Reform itself may disintegrate. There is already a gulf between the values of Reform voters and its leadership, which may end up recreating the verry disconnect that spurred the implosion of the traditional parties.

In this respect, Reform may implode even faster. Reform have hijacked the local elections for their own devices - to advance their political position nationally, without a local government manifesto or agenda, filling posts with novices and opportunists, who like the social capital but have no idea what councillors even do. That will bring its own problems and harm Reform’s reputation.

It may even be that the Reform surge doesn’t happen in 2029, leaving no party capable of forming a lasting government or coalition, where the result of this “great realignment” is to expose what many of us already suspect. Britain is a fragmented and ungovernable mess, and it will take a generation to return to anything resembling stability and good governance, assuming we can avoid the descent into civil conflict. It’s difficult for any party to articulate the hopes and aspirations of the British people when the people themselves are so fragmented and demoralised.

It’s in a blogger’s best interests to keep up a regular presence online but as regular readers will know, I am occasionally beset by periods of gloom when I can’t bring myself to say anything at all. To describe this as writer’s block is to mischaracterise it. This is a fully fledged slump. There is nothing new to report and all I really have to offer is a counsel of despair. It’s when I get like this I find it wise to go away and do something else entirely.

For that reason, I was away last week sitting at the end of RAF Lakenheath runway getting my fix of F15Es, while this week I’ve made myself a neat little model Harrier GR1. Speculation about the local elections seemed superfluous. Usually, local elections are little more than an opinion poll on the performance of the sitting government. This one is no different in that we will see Labour's unpopularity reflected in the results.

These elections, however, are also a health check on our democracy, where we will see multiple seats falling to sectarian influences, and foreign born individuals who have no business even being in this country. That will be the analysis to look out for, because cleaning up this mess has to be the first priority of any future right wing government. But it's not going to be Reform, evidently.

Reform UK has stood a number of foreign candidates to the displeasure of its supporters. The leader of Reform UK in Portsmouth has hit back after the party was criticised for selecting a Bangladeshi man to stand in next year’s city council elections.

Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, 23, who came to the UK on a student visa and has leave to remain in the UK, was announced as the candidate for the Central Southsea ward on Monday. But on social media, some followers criticised the decision saying “non-brits should not be allowed to stand, and Reform should not be endorsing this”. Councillor George Madgwick, who moved to the party in July and is now the group leader in the city, said the comments were “frankly disgusting” and the abuse was “appalling”.

It was already bad enough that Reform is an ideologically rudderless entity with nothing approaching an intellectual foundation, but this is symptomatic of a party that will take on literally anyone and has completely lost touch with what it is actually for. I’d already picked up on signals that this was the case and predicted as much. A party that has no system of principles will take on anyone.

This is especially depressing for me. I’ve completely given up hope of an electoral solution. This, taken with the lamentable slop of Restore Britain, underscores that the British right is incapable of getting its act together. It’s also a confirmation that all of my efforts over the last couple of years have been a comprehensive failure. Nothing I’ve said has made the slightest impact.

Worse still, I get the feeling that Reform’s disarray is broadly reflecting of our political culture. Culturally we are in deeper trouble than anyone realises. We’re now seeing electoral addresses in foreign languages and half the country doesn’t even see what the problem with that is. We are that supine. We should also recall that not long ago, a psychotic African walked into a children's dance class in Southport, slaughtered three little girls, and nobody lost their job and nobody was deported. It will keep happening.

In the meantime, we have the dismal prospect of a Labour leadership contest, where for some reason, Labourites can’t see that Angela Rayner is a rancid skank with the IQ of a potato - who most certainly will not revive the party’s fortunes. This might just be enough to tip the country over the edge and into economic oblivion, suggesting that we could be looking at a general election sooner than anyone realises. For what that’s worth. One gets a sense, though, that I’m very far from alone in my sense of resignation and exasperation. A summer of discontent awaits.

Occasionally I will tune out of politics, especially when it goes quiet. It’s really not healthy to expose yourself to the daily torrent of miserable news without a break. The basic gist of politics right now is that the cost of everything is going up by more than you can afford, your job is being abolished, the things you enjoy are being made illegal/prohibitively expensive, they're devaluing your assets, replacing you with sexually incontinent low-IQ third worlders, and they want a big war so they can send your children away to die.

The future is that you will work to your grave and the moment you can’t afford your mortgage/rent, you’re either in the street or in a HMO, sharing with a bunch of strangers. Your pension will be worthless at this rate, especially if politicians appropriate the power to decide how it’s invested, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to take things like electricity for granted in a few years time.

Depressingly, most of these things are wholly self-inflicted. Things could be turned around in the meantime, but only by a razor sharp government with a clue what it’s doing. That just seems unrealistic for Britain.

I make no predictions about the next general election. It seems certain that the Labour vote will collapse, but the degeneracy and rank stupidity of the Green Party means there is no obvious place for the liberal left vote to go.

We will know more which way this goes very soon. Labour is on track to lose up to 1,800 councillors. If Labour performs the way we think they will in the local elections, it is likely that Keir Starmer will be given his marching orders, giving way to something even more unwholesome. One pundit suggests the bond market is starting to price in more socialism. The 10-year gilt yield will go through 5% — and the next PM won’t last five minutes.

As of late April 2026 the 10-year gilt yield is already sitting at 4.93–4.99%, the highest in years. Markets are grinding higher on sticky inflation, weak growth forecasts, energy shocks from the Middle East, and scepticism about any government’s fiscal credibility. A clean break above 5% would be brutal for mortgages, debt servicing, and whatever fiscal headroom the next lot think they have.

It seems, then, that we could be looking a bigger crisis, bringing about a much earlier general election. If Starmer goes then it is likely we will see a full-blown outbreak of Looney Tunes civil war on the left. Angela Rayner is the name that keeps surfacing, and unless I’m wildly out of touch, absolutely nobody outside the Westminster bubble seriously sees her as a viable proposition. Rayner is the bookies’ favourite, but she remains a polarising figure outside the activist base. A leadership contest could easily fracture Labour further between the soft left, the unions, and whatever remains of the centrists — handing Reform and the Tories a clear run in any early election.

What we’re likely to see, though, isn’t just anti-incumbent politics. Rather, it is structural fragmentation. First-past-the-post is breaking under multi-party reality - and virtually anything can happen, where turnout (unpredictable as it is) makes all the difference. Britain is becoming politically unstable and that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.

Supposing we see a Reform/Tory coalition, we know that Nigel Farage isn’t up to the job and will be gone in under two years, perhaps handing the reins to Zia Yusuf, and it is likely to produce a chaotic government that’s big on promise but short on delivery, walking into ambushes and making problems for itself against a backdrop of strikes and unrest. They’ll do a few good things then run out of steam as they disintegrate, by which time the Tories might well start looking like a recovery option. Populism is likely to fail by way of its unpreparedness.

Here is where I concur with the influential X account “Drukpa Kunley”. “Though Populist governments will start to come to power in Europe in coming years probably inevitable many will be turfed out for inadequacies and you’ll have to wait until Second Wave Populism to see sustained results.”

First-wave populism (Reform, AfD, etc.) excels at channeling rage and breaking the Overton window. It is far less good at the grinding work of statecraft: detailed policy, competent personnel, and surviving the inevitable media-lawfare ambushes. A chaotic Reform-influenced government that delivers some wins on immigration and net zero but fails on growth and living standards would simply discredit the brand permanently - proving the sceptics right that rage alone is not a governing strategy..

This is precisely why I wanted to see something like Restore Britain, with a more serious agenda than Reform, but what we got was slop-tweeting from Rupert Lowe, zero policy development, and the rather frank admission from Lowe that if Restore doesn’t win in 2029 then he’s off elsewhere. What was actually needed was something that presumes Reform incompetence, building for the moment when it imploded. A ten to fifteen year plan.

There was never any possibility of replacing Reform as the default anti-incumbent party in the interim. Reform has brand recognition and exposure that Rupert Lowe simply cannot match in a short time. Unless you happen to be following Restore figures on X its political footprint is non-existent. Having deliberately steered my X algorithm away from the fringe right, even I’m surprised by how little reach it has.

Again we are confronted with the sad fact that the right doesn’t want to do the hard yards of starting from scratch. They want the solution delivered to them on a plate by somebody else and looks to the same handful of Ukippy flunkies to produce it.

Britain’s political system is fragmenting under first-past-the-post while facing deep structural crises that no single election will fix. The most likely path is continued instability, weak governments, and accelerating public disillusionment until a genuinely competent “second wave” emerges — or until something breaks. The latter seems more likely.

Ultimately, the public can persevere if there is light at the end of the tunnel. But there isn’t even a glimmer. Hardworking people have to endure increasing job insecurity, shrinking buying power, exorbitant bills and diminishing hopes of ever reaching a state of financial security. The ongoing conflict with Iran has pushed things to the brink. One more global shock could be the thing that ends the world as we have known it.

The other day I was a bit early picking up my other half from the station so I stopped at a local Ford dealership to have a look at some of the used cars on the lot. Occasionally I have flights of fantasy about owning something a little sexier than a ten year old Vauxhall.

As it happens I quite like my Insignia. It’s not a performance car but it’s a competent motorway cruiser and it’s very nimble on the back roads, and though it’s a contentious thing to say, I think the Insignia is a good looking car. It’s good enough for my purposes.

I have to say, it certainly wasn’t my first choice of car. I wouldn’t have minded something a bit more prestigious but I’ve had German luxury cars before and they’re nothing but expensive sensor faults and non-mechanical problems. I went with the Insignia because of its ubiquity. A full round of new brake discs and pads doesn’t break the bank, and when you open the bonnet, if looks positively agricultural. It’s very simple to maintain to the extent that even I can do certain repairs with the aid of a YouTube video.

What lets it down is the fuel economy but to get better economy in a similar spec car I would’ve had to buy smaller which doesn’t really do for a tall chap like me, and it turns out that economy comes at a premium. The cheaper they are to run, the more expensive they are. A low mileage Ford Focus would have cost more than my Insignia. On balance, I think I chose very wisely. My car is a masterclass in adequacy. It does what I need it to do and no more.

That is essentially my baseline when looking for a new car so at the Ford dealership I sat in a a newish Focus, just to see what it was like. The first problem was putting the seat back far enough. It’s on an electric motor and it’s slow. The second problem is that everything is now a function on a screen on the centre console. This common for new generation cars. Absolutely everything computerised on the Tesla.

I hate this. I just want to be able to reach down and press a button or pull a lever without taking my eyes off the road. I don’t want to have to pull in and navigate function menus just to adjust my wing mirrors. Then there’s the other problem. It was too small. I don’t especially need a larger car but when you move down a size bracket, everything else including the seats and steering wheel are scaled down a little bit. I just don’t like sitting in small cars (even though the new Focus is huge by contrast with its predecessors).

I was disappointed by this because I do actually like how it looks and it gets better economy than my Insignia. But with that goes the new breed of smaller capacity engine with all kinds of accoutrements to make it do the same thing. And with that goes a whole new level of complexity and expensive points of failure.

The problem here is that isn’t just the new Focus. I had a look at a couple of other cars on the lot, and the choice is limited. Almost every other car is an SUV now, and I don’t want an SUV and I don’t want a complex driving interface. It’s all academic since I will not be able to afford one this side of 2029 anyway, but this will be the choice in the future. Ford has discontinued the Mondeo and Vauxhall has shit-canned the Insignia. All you can get now is bloated, boring, expensive, complicated and slow.

As for going electric, I have not yet seen anything that persuades me I want that level of inconvenience in my life. My benchmark is that I want to get from York to Fairford and back without having to recharge. There are no charging points at airshows. Despite the leaps in recent years, the range problem is still a problem, and the daily reality of owning an EV just doesn’t appeal to me.

The problem here is that with all new cars essentially being shit, is that this shit is the feed stock for the used car market, which is causing problems for the sector, People can’t buy the used cars they actually want. Buying a used EV is a roll of the dice, and buying a used hybrid could mean buying a very expensive lemon.

Because of this, normal cars like mine are actually holding their value quite well. I’m not the only one who just wants a normal road car that doesn’t require a computer science degree just to switch on. Only we’re not even allowed to have those. The government is now punishing drivers of older cars by pushing road tax up to £760. You’ll have to pay that just to put an ancient V6 Mondeo on the road. You are only allowed to drive expensive, bloated, boring and complex machines and if you can’t afford one, then tough. Then if you buy what the government is nudging your towards, they will shift the goalposts.

Depressingly, the EV mandate only makes this worse. European car manufacturers are compelled to manufacture cars that people don’t want to run on electricity that we don’t have, which we can no longer even afford to make thanks to Net Zero, so China is dumping its EV surplus on us - which will either lead to new tariffs ensuring nobody at all can afford a car, or the complete death of the European car industry.

There are lots of moving parts right now that disrupt the auto industry, not least the war in Iran, and the skyrocketing cost of diesel, but with the Labour government looking at a per mile tariff for EVs, there’s no way for the motorist to win. The bottom line is that they are killing off personal mobility.

For my part it means soldiering on with my ten year old Vauxhall for as long as it can cope with me as a driver. Only we won’t end up like Cuba with people maintaining old classics because the government will price them off the road. Those in the lower income bracket will simply have to give up motoring entirely, which is ultimately what the uniparty wants.

There is, however, a certain logic to all this. If the objective is urban densification, and to reduce the overall number of road journeys, then the motorist does have to be squeezed, but this creates an yet another problem when people are electing to move out of the cities to get away from third-worldism and into dormitory estates on the outskirts which necessitates a car in order to commute. The government’s solution to commuting is to eliminate jobs so people don’t have to travel at all.

In the meantime, those of us on modest incomes who still need to get around will be running older, thirstier cars weaving between potholes created by boring new SUV bricks handed to people with fake disabilities. Long gone are the golden days of motoring when you could pick a newish Audi A4 for £7k and actually drive it. You are now condemned to bland techno-junk if you can afford to drive at all. One by one, the little things that make life in Britain worth living are being erased.

The Renters Rights Act is having predictable effects. We now have mass evictions as landlords sell up, a huge fall in the number of properties available to rent, landlords/letting agents intensely vetting tenants, and mega-landlords taking over the market. Anybody who understood the basics of the housing market could see this coming a mile off.

This is exacerbating an already acute crisis. Many renters are clinging on by their fingernails. Self-styled “working class academic”, Lisa McKenzie, complains on X:

Brilliant just received a letter from my landlord putting the rent up another £520 a year that’s my holiday gone. I know people who go to work aren't entitled to holidays or to live on their own or to have the heating on. What wont we be entitled to next year? At what point does this end? I know families eating from foodbanks to service the rent. I actually feel sick because I know next year when the rent goes up again I wont have much more to cut back on. I'm getting closer to the HMO. This is why people aren't saving towards pensions.

I suspect there are thousands of people in this kind of precarious position who work full time, on a passable salary, who are only one rent rise or a major bill increase away from finding basic independent living is no longer viable. In just slightly different circumstances, I could see myself in the same predicament.

What Lisa describes could be virtually any one of of us. Millions of us are only one redundancy or a divorce away from destitution. Just ten years ago, independent living on one salary was possible, albeit it in an expensive one bedroom flat, but now we see that middle income individuals who work hard are destined to live with strangers in HMOs if they want to live within commuting range of a job.

By importing millions of people, successive governments have fed the social contract into the shredder and made our own people compete for scraps while taxes destroy native wealth. This isn’t a cost of living crisis. This is a collapse of the existing economic order. The native advantage has been completely obliterated and our own people will have to fight tooth and nail just to stay on the bottom rung of the ladder. Our own people now have to compete with illegal immigrants for basic provisions. Either that or simply concede the obvious... it is simply too expensive to continue living in Britain - and there are no rewards for hard work.

Alarmingly, we’re now beginning to see the real world consequences of this (reported in The Sun). X user “Miss Jo” reports…

About 50 years ago, travelling showmen in the UK were given the right to live in the campground set up in Buckles Lane, Thurrock. The right to live there was strictly limited to travelling showmen. Now, those same showmen are letting out their places to illegal migrants.

Adverts can be seen on Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace and other local sites, showing caravans for £160/£170 per week. It is estimated that 76% of the 1,000 occupants are not supposed to be living there. Not only are there illegal migrants but there are also problems with drug running and other criminal enterprises. The council is looking the other way but local residents are becoming increasingly concerned. The situation is becoming worse, as more and more caravans are being squeezed into the space.

This is something to keep an eye on. This is one of those imperceptibly slow indicators that we're becoming a third world country. It starts off with a small caravan park but as more and more people are frozen out of rentals and mortgages (accelerating under Labour), we will see these caravan parks becoming shanty towns. You can expect to see them popping up all around the M25. We're developing our very own trailer park underclass - and it won't exclusively be migrants.

Councils have got wise to Airbnb scams, beds in sheds, and illegal subletting of social housing, so it will be displaced to this kind of ad hoc settlement, where we will see outbreaks of third world diseases.

What we need to do is drive a bulldozer through the lot of them, but councils won't do that because they will create hundreds of homeless in a single stroke, so authorities will let it fester and dump the problem on the police as they attempt to contain the criminality that goes with it.

This kind of accommodation is where London will get its supply of Deliveroo drivers, and they'll be hotbeds of organised crime. You'll see dilapidated static caravans with brand new Audis parked out front, and this is where you'll fund small scale cannabis farms and rudimentary drug labs. This issue is probably already bigger than most of us understand. It's masking a massive homelessness crisis, while also creating a huge shadow workforce that pays no tax at all.

I always joked that if my Mrs finally got sick of me and threw me out of the house, I could always set up shop in a low rent slum in Grimsby just so long as I have broadband and a nearby model shop, but that might now be out of reach, and it’s looking like many of us could be holed up in static caravans in our retirement, even if we’re mugs enough to work hard. There’s just no reason for young people to stay in Britain.

Superficially, it looks like Reform has (at last) published a meaty policy paper. The party intends to terminate Indefinite Leave to Remain. Alas, we are no further forward in policy terms. The paper is almost entirely derivative padding with the actual policy response being a mere six paragraphs.

The basic position is that Reform will abolish ILR as an immigration category completely, meaning no new awards and those currently holding it will have it rescinded. Reform will replace ILR a with a 5-year renewable visa, subject to considerably stricter criteria, bringing the UK in line with comparators like the UAE. Anyone currently with ILR will need to reapply for visas that do not offer recourse to welfare. Requirements will include:

• Much higher salary thresholds (based on a verified job offer or averaged over the 5-year period in case of renewal), with the right to bring dependants tied to thresholds that will be above median UK earnings.

• Stricter rules around good character, covering deception (around their visa application), financial misconduct, tax compliance and criminal convictions, all of which will be more rigorously checked via biometric information.

• A much higher standard of English.

Alarmingly, though, they then say “There will also be an Acute Skills Shortage Visa available for those working in national critical sectors such as care”.

This is how we got into this mess to begin with. The Boriswave is a symptom of this mentality. The idea that we have no choice but to lean on immigration where there are skills/labour shortages. In this instance, we don’t have a skills shortage or a labour shortage. We have a incentives problem. If Reform wants to solve this part of the immigration problem then it needs to publish a fundamental overhaul of the care system.

This is where we have to get serious. We struggle to recruit people into care because it is a low wage, low prestige role with limited career prospects - for what is a physically and emotionally demanding job. When you can make more stacking shelves as the Co-op, nobody is lining up to do this kind of work, so you get private equity care homes importing random Africans to do the work, who treat it as a visa backdoor for them and their families, and they’re hired whether they’re qualified or not.

This is an important policy area to look at because the sector is rife with visa fraud and illegal working. It’s an open secret because there is no local authority enforcement or surveillance. It’s also important to look at because the lack of suitable care places is how we get discharge bottlenecks in hospitals - which is a big part of the NHS productivity problem.

What we have to do is take a second look at the working time directive, reduce reliance on agency staff and have proper full time salaried roles that reflect the seriousness of the job, rather than treating care workers as bottom rung dogsbodies. We need to ensure there is a viable career path, and incentives to stay in the industry.

This is where tied housing can help. Care workers should be prioritised for social housing and have their rents substantially discounted to offset lower salaries, thus ensuring longevity. We can sweeten the deal with enhanced right to buy. Recruitment and retention policy is key.

I seem to recall the SDP mooted a national care service. This could map army structures, with care platoons assigned to districts, with a formal ranking system to provide a career path and pathways to pay increases, with master-sergeant type specialist roles that can lead to upper management.

Secondly, we have to end the mentality of dumping granny on the council. Instead of carer benefits, we need to look at tax credits for people looking after elderly parents, to ensure that families play a greater role in care work (as it should be). That we wash our hands of our elderly is why the adult social care bill has skyrocketed in recent years.

If we are going to tackle this part of the immigration problem, then we need to completely rethink a lot of the underlying assumptions about the care and welfare system. The moment you make exceptions to immigration policy as Reform has, you will end up back where you started, with unlimited immigration to solve a never-ending problem.

As much as anything, home is the best environment for elderly care. Modern care homes are miserable places where people wait to die. There needs to be a greater emphasis on supported living rather than total care, institutionalising the elderly and turning them into zombies. District care has a role to play, but more must be done to enable downsizing into adapted homes and homes for later living.

As such, there is a housing policy dimension to solving this problem - which brings me back to the point I’ve been hammering for years now. If we’re going to get to the root of immigration problems we need a full spectrum of policies, each of which will have an immigration dimension.

Reversing the Boriswave is certainly a priority issue, but unless we make the necessary structural adjustments to housing and the welfare system, ending the reliance on imported labour, we’re only one Tory government away from another Boriswave. Since there is no longer a discernible difference between the Tories and Reform, it might even be Reform that does it.